Paul Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to his retirement in 1969 (he subsequently settled at Florida State University in the USA). After proposing a general formalism for quantum mechanics in 1926, he generalized the theory to incorporate special relativity. Dirac used the relativistic quantum theory of the electron to account for the observed spin of the particle and, shortly afterwards, successfully to predict the existence of an 'antiparticle', which has the same mass as the electron but the opposite charge, and is now called the positron. Dirac also made other profound contributions to the quantum theory of matter and radiation, and many of them are described in his classic The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930). He shared the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics with Erwin Schrödinger. From the 1950s, he became a somewhat isolated figure, owing to his unwillingness to accept the widely used procedure of renormalization, which is used to eliminate unwanted infinities from the quantum field theories that form the basis for modern theories of elementary particles.
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